The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card continues AMD’s proud tradition of technology leadership with support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games, including Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., Electronic Art’s BattleForge and SEGA’s Stormrise released last month, as well as GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky. When compared to DirectX 10 game play, DirectX 10.1 games have proven to deliver higher game performance and an improved visual experience.

“The new ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card could very well be the must-have gaming product of this spring,” said Adrian Thomson, vice president, Marketing, Sapphire. “With breakthrough levels of game performance, cutting-edge feature support like DirectX 10.1, and high degree of performance tuning flexibility, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is one of the best performers in its class.”

Making the best even better

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card delivers exceptional value to gamers, handling even the most intense games at high resolutions and image quality settings. For overclocking enthusiasts, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 offers tremendous performance tuning potential. Those looking to get even more performance out of their gaming rigs can combine as many as four ATI Radeon HD 4890 cards in one PC utilizing ATI CrossFireX technology.

“Gamers that want The Ultimate Visual Experience demand the best performing card, and our new ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards will give them exactly that,” said Eddie Memon, vice president, Marketing, XFX. “With the new ATI Radeon HD 4890 we’re approaching the holy grail of clock speeds, targeting 1GHz, achievable through XFX’s superior design and the quality of the new graphics processor from AMD.”

ATI Stream technology

By harnessing ATI Stream technology in combination with a number of ATI Stream-enabled applications, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card can also help accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video into multiple formats for use on differing consumer electronics devices. CyberLink, an innovative software developer for digital media creation, playback, and sharing applications, has optimized its award-winning video editing software, PowerDirector 7 to make use of ATI Stream technology. The recently released update to PowerDirector 7 incorporates ATI

hardocp managed to clock to 1000 mhz core clock, thats way higher than a 4870 could do with same voltage.

IT IS NOT A PURE OC VERSION OF 4870!.

it uses less power idle, and just 7 watts more load, this isnt a 4870, but a perfected 4870.

still, it isnt more than ~15% faster

But you can clock to 970 mhz easy!

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Agreed and this card has faster shaders than the 4870 also, however, people shouldnt get too carried away by the overclock potential.....there is a review here that shows that a card overclocked to 1000mhz against the stock 850mhz only picks up a couple of FPS in many games. Across the board I read about a 5-7% improvement over the 4870 at stock speeds.

So are these more than overclocked 4870s? I think their die size is different and they've changed the way the shaders work.

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The Xbitlabs review of the HD4890 has some very detailed info on the increased die size and additional transistors of the RV790.

As far as I can tell, ATI didn't do anything to how the shaders work, but rather "revised the RV770 internal structure".

Tomshardware also has a good comparison of the HD4890 running at clocks of 750/900, in comparsion with an HD4870 at those clocks. Results were pretty much the same, indicating nothing significant performance-wise, that is improved over the RV770 core at a clock for clock basis.

The improvements in the RV790 core and the PCB it operates on mainly attribute to it's higher GPU clock and OC'ing abilities.